Current Interest

Description: A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit.

Description: Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and he shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of presidents including, besides Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of influential citizen activists, Meacham brings to life turning points in American history. In each of these dramatic, crucial turning points, the battle to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear, was joined, even as it is today. While the American story has not always been heroic, and the outcome of our battles never certain, Meacham reassures us, "the good news is that we have come through darkness before"--as, time and again, Lincoln's better angels have found a way to prevail.-- From statement provided by publisher.

Description: A candid new political memoir from Senator John McCain--his most personal book in years--covering everything from 2008 up to the present.

Description: The true story of Abraham Lincoln's last murder trial, a case in which he had a deep personal involvement--and which played out in the nation's newspapers as he began his presidential campaign. At the end of the summer of 1859, twenty-two-year-old Peachy Quinn Harrison went on trial for murder in Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, who had been involved in more than three thousand cases--including more than twenty-five murder trials--during his two-decades-long career, was hired to defend him. This was to be his last great case as a lawyer. What normally would have been a local case took on momentous meaning. Lincoln's debates with Senator Stephen Douglas the previous fall had gained him a national following, transforming the little-known, self-taught lawyer into a respected politician. He was being urged to make a dark-horse run for the presidency in 1860. Taking this case involved great risk. His reputation was untarnished, but should he lose this trial, should Harrison be convicted of murder, the spotlight now focused so brightly on him might be dimmed. He had won his most recent murder trial with a daring and dramatic maneuver that had become a local legend, but another had ended with his client dangling from the end of a rope. The case posed painful personal challenges for Lincoln. The murder victim had trained for the law in his office, and Lincoln had been his friend and his mentor. His accused killer, the young man Lincoln would defend, was the son of a close friend and loyal supporter. And to win this trial he would have to form an unholy allegiance with a longtime enemy, a revivalist preacher he had twice run against for political office--and who had bitterly slandered Lincoln as an "infidel...too lacking in faith" to be elected. Lincoln's Last Trial captures the presidential hopeful's dramatic courtroom confrontations in vivid detail as he fights for his client--but also for his own blossoming political future. It is a moment in history that shines a light on our legal system, as in this case Lincoln fought a legal battle that remains incredibly relevant today. --Amazon.com.

Description: In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of all the men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau and spent more than three months there, talking in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. Barracoon illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it.

Description: A memoir about a young girl who, raised by Mormon survivalists in the mountains of Idaho and forbidden to go to school, defies her family, educates herself, and earns degrees including a PhD from Cambridge University.

Description: Fox News anchor Bret Baier reveals as never before President Ronald Reagan's battle to end the Cold War, framed around the historic, three-day 1988 Moscow Summit.

Description: The inside story of the rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes had created a startup "unicorn" that promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. The problem: The technology didn't work. For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. Here is the story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.-- From statement provided by publisher.

Description: How a goal-setting system helped large tech companies succeed.